Dear friends,
We are reaching out to you to support the development of an exciting, and a much needed, solution of a virtual sign-language interpreter that aims to convert speech into Indian Sign Language (ISL).
Since 2018, our non-profit organization – Friends For inclusion has been collaborating with IIIT Bengaluru, researching and developing this solution. The research was supported by a corporate Foundation. Happy to share that our collaboration has resulted in us developing a proof-of-concept. What’s exciting is that our user-survey has found that the target audience is responding well to our solution and are able to identify words and sentences presented to them by our avatar.
Here is a demo video of our solution in action:
Unfortunately, due to the recent pandemic, we lost access to a couple of grants intended to support our next stage of development. Therefore, we are reaching out to our family and friends to support this initiative.
To give you the context of the solution: According to WHO, about 63 million people in India have a disabling hearing impairment, and globally it is estimated that about 10% of the hearing impaired use sign-language as a primary and often the only, method of communication. Unfortunately, India has less than 500 certified sign language interpreters, which forms a critical bridge between the deaf and the non-deaf population. This, as you would imagine, is grossly inadequate, not scalable and obstructs the mainstreaming of the deaf in our society.
Our prospective solution will help plug this gap, by providing an on-demand interpretation service. We feel this will be immensely useful in mainstreaming the deaf into our society and providing opportunities to access higher education, employment and even entertainment.
We invite you to join us in this unique initiative by providing a donation to support the development of this product. We are targeting to raise at least ₹15,00,000 for the next one year to build a minimum viable product. We have not kept any minimum denomination for contribution, every drop would count.
Please note:
- To make a donation, use this ICICI payment gateway. You can use multiple payment modes like Cheque, NEFT, RTGS, Cards and Internet Banking to make payment. You can also use any Bank account to make the payment
- Donations made to Friends For Inclusion are entitled to receive relevant deductions under section 80(g) of the income tax act
- Donations may be accepted only in INR (₹) and not in foreign currency as our FCRA certificate is still awaited
- For any follow-up question or information, please feel free to write to me at ankitrajivjindal@gmail.com or WhatsApp me at +919535767654